Chase Koch: evaluation

Transcript context

…How would you articulate that reason? I would say talent and values. I call it access to the farm team. This is our whole talent vision for Koch. Now, case in point, we operate, as I mentioned, in 60 countries, and I believe we’re in all 50 states. I would say how we deliberately think about talent, it’s we want to hire kids that are contribution motivated. I think too often you see in our culture that you have people, or in kids that are more deficiency motivated, if not destructively motivated. There’s a continuum there. Contribution motivated all the way to destructively motivated. On the contribution motivated side, take the positive. The reason why I say we want to hire the farm team is kids, whether they grew up on a farm or not, that doesn’t matter, but it’s the mindset. The mindset of grit and work ethic, and wanting to come in and make a contribution, as opposed to deficiency motivated where you come in with a victim mindset or you come in with a mindset of, “I went to this fancy school. Look at my resume. I had a 4.0, and I’m entitled to some role, some title, and some salary,” when you haven’t earned it yet. We want the contribution-motivated kids. Let me give you one example, Tyler. We have our CIO today at Koch, over all of Koch Inc., has no college degree. His first access to Koch was stripping lines in the parking lot. He just wanted to get in the building. This was back when we were way more stringent and way more process-driven on talent, which was the wrong way to approach it, just based on resumes and GPA 20-plus years ago. Somehow, he found a way in Koch. He proved himself that he knew a lot about technology. He was helping us a lot with data science in the early days. Then he saw the cyber wave coming and all the cyber risk that Koch had, and all the attacks we were getting, and he built a capability around that. He became CISO, head of our cybersecurity capability, built that, and then a number of different roles, but is now CIO of Koch. No college degree. His name is Jarrod Benson. Jarrod is, I’d say, that’s what we want. We want someone that’s come in and wants their role so badly, and they come in with fire in their belly, just wanting to make a contribution. Look where he is today. How has Wichita most changed since you grew up there?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.